If you run a website, "will AI search engines find me" used to be a question you couldn't do much about — you published, and you waited to be discovered whenever a crawler happened to reach you. That's still partly true. But it's worth understanding both halves of the picture: what happens automatically, and what you can actually do to speed it up or take more control over how your site is read.
What happens without you doing anything
If your site is public and reachable, it's the kind of thing a general web crawl is built to find in the ordinary course of working through links — no submission required. Once a crawler reaches your site, it reads your robots.txt first, follows whatever rules you've set there, and reads the pages you've made available to it. See what is a web crawler for what that process actually looks like, and askFinz-Crawler's documentation for exactly how askFinz's crawler identifies itself, how it paces its requests, and how to check whether it's already been visiting you.
The catch with waiting is exactly the catch with any crawl-based discovery: it happens in the crawler's own time, following its own path through the web's links, and there's no guarantee of how soon that reaches your specific site — especially a newer one without many other sites linking to it yet.
Putting your site directly in the queue
Rather than waiting to be found, you can submit your domain directly. Doing this puts your site straight onto the list of sites waiting to be looked at — no account, nothing to sign. It then goes through a quick review, since letting anything at all straight into an index without any check would make the index itself worse for everyone searching it. Reference sites, documentation, research, news, and ordinary company sites all pass this review easily; it exists to filter out spam and abuse, not to gatekeep legitimate sites.
Once accepted, reading starts from the pages you've published for search engines to see, at a pace built to stay out of your site's way, and pages become answerable as they're read rather than after some later rebuild. You can watch this happen — submitted domains are visible on the live status page as they move through the process. Submit your domain here.
Why a whole domain, not just one page
You can suggest a single URL, but a whole domain gives an indexer far more to work with — a lone page rarely explains itself fully; the definitions live in a glossary elsewhere on the site, the caveats are in an FAQ, the real detail is a few links deeper. Most real questions get answered by a section of a site working together, not one isolated page. Submitting the domain lets the index hold the whole picture, so an answer can actually draw on the part of your site that addresses the question, not just whichever single page happened to get suggested.
If you want deeper, priority integration
Beyond ordinary crawling and domain submission, sites that want their content read directly and kept current with priority — rather than through general crawling — can become a verified domain partner. That's the route for organisations that publish regularly and want their updates reflected close to the moment they're published, rather than whenever a general crawl next reaches them.
Keeping control over what gets read
Getting indexed doesn't mean giving up control. Your robots.txt remains the primary lever — it states which parts of your site a crawler may read, and a well-behaved crawler follows it, including any Crawl-delay you've set. If something's crawling in a way you don't want, askFinz-Crawler's page lists a contact route so a human can look into it. Indexing is meant to work with your preferences, not around them.
Further reading
- Put your domain in the queue directly: Submit a domain
- How the crawler behaves, and how to check your own logs against it: askFinz-Crawler documentation
- What actually happens to your pages once they're read: How a search index is built